Lead Applied Scientist: Large-Scale Search & IR

Thomson Reuters Foundation; New York (NY); On-site; USD 148,000 - 274,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive health, dental, vision,

Disability and life insurance programs

Competitive 401k with company match

Generous PTO and paid time off

Job summary

Thomson Reuters Foundation seeks an Lead Applied Scientist to own end-to-end design, development, and deployment of large-scale search and information retrieval systems powering Thomson Reuters products. You will influence indexing, ranking, semantic retrieval, and hybrid search across vast legal and enterprise content.

You will lead teams, publish results, mentor practitioners, and drive measurable production impact with modern IR and LLM-based techniques.

Qualifications

• PhD and 8+ years of post-degree industry experience in search/retrieval systems.
• Hands-on depth across indexing, retrieval, ranking, relevance evaluation, and production deployment.
• Experience building production search systems at scale and contributing to AI strategy.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy architectures for large-scale search across legal, tax, and enterprise content.
• Build and optimize ingestion pipelines for retrieval-ready documents.
• Develop ranking and re-ranking with traditional IR and LLM-based approaches.
• Improve retrieval via semantic, hybrid, and query-understanding techniques.
• Design evaluation frameworks for retrieval performance and end-user outcomes.
• Lead indexing strategies and search infrastructure decisions.
• Collaborate with engineering to deliver scalable, reliable search services.
• Mentor scientists and contribute to self-service search platform capabilities.
• Provide technical input to leadership on search and AI strategy.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Hugging Face Transformers

Distributed model development

Education

PhD in Computer Science, Information Retrieval, AI, ML, or related field

Tools

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch/Solr/Vespa or similar search technologies

Job description

Thomson Reuters Foundation seeks an Lead Applied Scientist to own end-to-end design, development, and deployment of large-scale search and information retrieval systems powering Thomson Reuters products. You will influence indexing, ranking, semantic retrieval, and hybrid search across vast legal and enterprise content.

You will lead teams, publish results, mentor practitioners, and drive measurable production impact with modern IR and LLM-based techniques.